


Love Conquers Fear

by DarkJediQueen



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Phobias
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-27
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2021-01-04 19:41:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21203006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarkJediQueen/pseuds/DarkJediQueen
Summary: Double-Ohs were never supposed to show fear. Fear was the thing that killed agents. Even James Bond has his fears and Q feels humbled that James felt like he could let his fears take him over while Q talks to him.





	Love Conquers Fear

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Flantastic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flantastic/gifts).

> **Year**: Post Skyfall  
**Spoilers**: Up Through Skyfall  
**Notes**: Written as a gift fic for Flantastic who won my story for her participation in the 007Fest for 2019.   
**Beta**: ScarsLikeVelvet

There were days that Q wished he had never taken the job as Quartermaster for MI6. He loved the job, mostly. There were times that he wanted to kill the people who he worked with but none more than his lover, James Bond. Typically though, that urge came from something that James had done instead of something that had been done to James. 

"Quartermaster?" Mallory asked as he stepped up behind Q.

"I nearly have him. The truck that took him is driving out into weird lands. I've already notified local DEA about the drug farm that I found, and they are mounting a raid into it as they had never been able to find it."

"How is that going to help us get 007 back?" Tanner asked. The man must have snuck up with Mallory even though Q had only heard a single person come up behind him. Or the man had snuck up before Mallory had got there. 

"It might not if the truck isn't going that way, but I'm looking at day old footage, and it's very dense woods so I can't fast forward as much as I would like in case it slips into the trees. I have already had to backtrack three times." Q wasn't frantic yet. He would find James, alive or dead. If he were dead, the DEA wouldn't be able to take the drug dealers into custody as Q would fry their tech and kill them all with fire. That was the only thing that was keeping Q sane at the moment, the need for revenge if needed. 

Q had added new tech to James' body, with James' permission, of course. Still, Q hadn't thought about the fact that James would be taken in fucking backwoods Kentucky, and Q couldn't find him to activate it. That was something that he was going to fix before he put a fresh implant into James. He would make sure that he could send a broad signal off of cell towers and activate it. That would take some work, but Q figured that he could do it. It would be a lot of work, but if it saved just a single Double-Oh from death, Q would consider it worth it. Especially if that Double-Oh were his lover. 

"How is that thing still operational?" Tanner asked as he moved to lean over Q's shoulder as the truck came into full view at a crossroads in the dirt road. 

Q had asked himself that same question when he had watched James get thrown into the back. Q stopped the image as the truck started to turn. He opened up what maps there were of the area and found that the road was going to take James away from the location of the drugs. He frowned. The truck had been there the day before, though, as Q would recognize that wreck anywhere.

"Wishes, people who can't do anything else, and probably a thousand rolls of duct tape," Q answered. He zoomed in on James, who was still in the back of the truck, and he looked to be still knocked out. Q had known that something had been used on his lover, but he had been unable to figure that out. He needed to see about an implant that would check his blood, even if it sent it wirelessly to be analyzed at full here at MI6. He might even be able to add in drugs that would counteract the common knockout drugs. Or adrenaline added to it so that it would help wake up the agent quicker. 

"One does what they must with what they have," Mallory said.

Q nodded his head and let the video run in one window while he tracked where that road led. He didn't want any surprises on that front. It was something that was strange as hell as the road just ended. There were no offshoots. There was nothing. He lost view of the truck and just kept the screen zoomed out to see if it popped up, but it didn't, not for an hour. When it was back in view, James was not in the bed of the truck anymore, but there was another body. It was mummified with clothes still on it.

The code was easy to input so that the signal activated James's new tech. The sound only went to the earpiece that Q had in his ear just to make sure that the room wasn't exposed to the sounds of James' dying breath. 

"James?" Q asked. Fuck code names. That body in the back of the truck was not something that Q wanted to think about. 

"Q," James said, and he sounded groggy as hell. He had been drugged up to his gills, it seemed. The last time he had sounded like that, James had been waking up after surgery to remove a bullet lodged in his gut in Spain. Q had talked to him over the phone after he had woken up to get the location of the drive that he had been sent to steal. The drive had the location of weapons depots across Africa. James had refused to tell anyone at the hospital he was at where he had left the drive. 

"Where are you?" Q asked. He pinged the location where he had lost the truck to the trees to the agents that were on the ground to help James with his mission. They were in two jeeps that had been brought in for the mission. Jeeps were not out of place, given that the people in the area loved to go mudding. Q had made sure they were able to pass a quick scan with a scanner with well-hidden locations inside of the Jeeps. 

"I don't know." James' breathing changed as he moved around a little bit. There was an echo being picked up by the receiver in James' ear. 

Q turned to look at Mallory and Tanner and gave them a thumbs up. He didn't want to disrupt James' thoughts by speaking. Tanner pulled out his cell phone and dialed a number before he walked away, and Q pushed them from his mind.

"Keep us in the loop, Q," Mallory said.

Q pressed the button that muted his end. "I will, Sir. I would dispatch the medical van as well if I were you. It's not sure if 007 is hale and hearty or injured yet. He's still very groggy."

"I'll make sure that Tanner dispatches a second unit just to be safe." Mallory's eyes were on the roads in and out of the area they were in. The drugs were a secondary issue that MI6 had not known about when dispatching Jame to head into the fray. Q was upset that it had been far enough under the radar that even he had not been able to find it. 

"Q?" James asked.

"I'm here," Q said after he clicked back to where James could hear him. 

"Am I on standard comms?" James asked.

Q frowned as James never cared if he was heard by the rest of the Q-Branch or if that information was saved for mission files. This was being recorded, but Q could erase it after it was over. Mallory was exasperated by the flirting that happened over the comms, but as all of the Double-Ohs did it with someone who ran their mission, there wasn't much that he could do. The last time that Q had ignored him, James had got to where he was describing what he wanted to do to Q when he got back. Mallory told Q to engage to stop that from having to be stricken from the record. 

"No, I am the only one who can hear you, but it's being recorded, just in case."

"Good." James sounded off. 

Q used the location beacon that the comm was putting off and narrowed down where James was. It was going to take a few minutes for the image to come up as he swapped from video footage the satellite had taken and the live feed. There was nothing but trees, but Q could narrow it down to heat vision if needed. The satellite was the Crown Jewel of MI6's capability. It had been launched when a new satellite had been put into space by meteorologists who wanted to track the weather. It had been easy to piggyback it as the device was so much smaller than others. It ran off of a new battery that would let it run for a long time, as it consistently took in rays from the sun to recharge it's massive as hell capacity battery. 

"I really needed to hear you there," James said. 

"Quartermaster, the agents, need help finding 007," R yelled from the area behind Q. 

Q turned around to see that the agents in Jeeps were getting ready to head into the coverage that would stop them from being seen. They wouldn't need them if Q had been able to keep a good track of James in the woods, but the satellite was only able to be in one mode at a time. It couldn't track heat if it were just doing images. It was something that Q hadn't thought would be needed. 

Where James was, was not a good thing, Q noticed when he finally had the heat signature scan up. James was lying down on the ground. Seconds after that, Q realized that there was something blocking the heat signature and making it very faded. James wasn't on the ground. He was under the ground. 

"James, are you buried under the ground?"

"Yes, and given the smell, I think that there was a body in this coffin before me. It smells like an open casket." 

"And you have experience in that smell?" Q asked. 

"I do. I've dug up a few bodies before to get DNA to confirm that they are who we think they are, from enemies to allies that were missing or even our own agents." 

James' tone was off, and Q just couldn't put his finger on why. He tried to see through what he couldn't see on the scan to tell him what was wrong with James. It was strange as James was never off on a mission. There were grumpy days when he was home and grounded for some injury or another, but this was vastly different. James never ever sounded like this while on a mission.

Q typed off James's exact location, given the GPS of the location. He made sure that R knew that they would need digging equipment since there were more boots on the ground headed that way. As well as enough ammo to hold off anyone who stumbled onto the grave. Q was pretty sure that they would make sure that James stayed where he was. He also told her that he was going to keep James listening as he was buried alive. Q knew that James was going to have too much carbon dioxide in the coffin with him before he ran out of oxygen. Q started a count down based on a low estimate of how much time he thought James had left. 

"Hey, listen to me," Q said as he tapped for his door to shut. "I need you to be quiet, James, and to breathe normally. Don't get too excited. The teams are on their way to you. They will get you out, but you have to stay calm." 

"I know." James didn't sound like he was going to stay calm for long at all, but then James was a professional at this. He had stayed in a single spot for three days once so that no one knew that he was there before taking a shot that had killed a terrorist that had been threatening London. After he had taken that shot, he had easily fallen asleep while the chaos went around the compound. They had never found him because he had not moved at all. Well, that and Q's equipment that made it impossible to track his heat signature in the rocky outcropping he had been hiding inside of. When night had fallen, James had woken up and cleaned up his stuff before climbing back down. 

Q was pretty sure that James' calmness during that whole thing had been what had made Q fall in love with him. They had been lovers for two months at that point, and it was another two months before a drunk Q had spilled the beans. That was the first morning that Q had woken up with James in his bed, and they hadn't even had sex. James had nursed Q back from his hangover before he had made love to him. It had been so wonderful. That had been six months ago. The paperwork had been filled out, and so far, there had been no single issue outside of the flirting that James did over the comms. 

"Should I tell you what my plans are for the day?" Q asked. He had no clue what else he would be able to talk about that wouldn't set him off worrying about his lover. This wasn't that bad, but he had no clue when the rescue team was going to get there with anything that would actually help them get James out. Digging with hands was going to be hard with the ground, and Q had no clue what the soil was like. Yeah, the person had just done it to James. Still, if the guy had packed the ground to make it look less like there was a body buried there, it would be harder for them to dig James out, and there was no telling how far down the man was in the ground. 

R sent a message that the team was there, and the ground was packed. Which was Q's fear. There had been more than just that man there if the ground was packed. Q told her to tell the team to be careful. 

The first gunshot was audible even through, however far, James was in the ground. It was interesting to hear the sounds of muffled gunshots as MI6, and whoever else was there traded shots. Q tuned out the sounds from the rest of Q-Branch. 

"Sure," James said when the shots calmed down.

Q really wished that he had a way of tracking James' heart rate with the earpiece that he had in the skin behind his ear. He made a few notes on a random sheet of paper on precisely what he wanted that thing to have on it from now on. James was all for being his guinea pig. Especially for things that were not work-related

"After I'm done with your mission, I have a meeting that Mallory put off for a few hours when this all went to hell. He and Tanner are the only ones who are going to be at it, and since they are busy, it's not like it's hard for them to put it off. Then I have to go home and cook dinner. I picked up one of the kits from the store down the block. I want to see if I can mess it up just as much as I screwed up dinner the night you tried to talk me through it. I have a backup plan of cold sandwiches and crisps. Then I have a date on my couch with a few TV show episodes that my wonderful boyfriend bought me the box set of before he left for work. So I wouldn't be lonely while at home."

James laughed a little, but it was a pinched laugh. 

Q knew that Double-Ohs were trained to work through their fears, and even the Navy had trained even more of that out of him, but Q hated it. It had allowed James to survive for as long as he had, but it sucked that even now, James wasn't going to show even Q the fear when he wasn't at home in their flat together. 

"Then tomorrow I am going to make sure that the contractor understands just what we want to be done with the rooms that need a renovation. I'm not enjoying staying in a hotel for the near month that it's going to take. It is better than nothing, and at least I can get room service twenty-four hours a day, even if I get home from work at ten in the evening. That will be great, even if the bed won't have the proper smell on it the entire time." 

James hummed in agreement, and Q wasn't sure that he wasn't going to sleep listening to Q prattle on. Q took a breath to start to speak again when he heard the sound of a thud over James' comm.

"James?"

"Shovel in the dirt. They are here for me."

"Good. Good. Just keep on listening to me. I am looking forward to having a bigger bedroom with room for the shelves that I want. Even if I am losing my storage room. The office will be nice and having a room for a little equipment so I can run at home instead of here at Six would be great. Though that will also be good to watch my lover run on the treadmill and get all sweaty before he comes and fucks me would be great as well. Worth all of the hassle of what I have to go through for the month." 

"My poor baby." 

There was the sound of a harder thud, and Q knew what it was. It was the sound of metal on wood. The team had hit the coffin. 

R sent Q a message that the team thought that James was about six feet down. Before Q could type back at here, there was the sound of a shovel breaking through the box. It was smart that they broke into the coffin before doing anything else to make sure that James had fresh air.

"007?" an unknown voice called out over the comms.

"Present and mostly fine. I think that I have a broken leg. I think that I am fine other than that."

Q kept his noises to himself about his lover having a broken leg. James would never have led with that with Q to make him not worry. It wasn't like he was running on it. He would be escorted out.

"Seven dead who were waiting for us. They weren't expecting us to know where they were. 

Q expanded his window and saw that the seven had been hiding back far enough away that Q's feed on James had not been wide enough to see them. He could see with the coding rolling that R had been pulled out enough to make sure that the MI6 team was fine. R and he worked well together when it came to missions. Q focusing on doing what the agent needed to get through it while she monitored the larger picture to make sure that nothing else surprised them. They had been a pair working on getting Double-Ohs through missions before they had both jumped up in ranks. Not every single mission needed them. Still, the ones that went beyond the ability for the handlers to take on were always a priority for Q and R. 

"We have 007, Quartermaster," Anderson said over the comms. The lead agent in charge of James' backup. "We will see him to a hospital for his compound fracture and then home. Go home yourself and get some rest." Anderson's tone was calm and collected. He was why Q tasked him with the harder missions that Double-Ohs needed back up for. He didn't freak out. He could become a great Double-Oh, but he didn't ever apply for it. Q could understand that.

Q swapped his audio back to the main channel so that Anderson could hear him. "Proceed to exfil as soon as possible. The firefight had to draw attention from someone. Godspeed on your trip home." 

* * *

Q smelled the tea before he got into the hotel room. He frowned as he had not left tea not drunk in the room, and he had even washed out his cup after he had finished breakfast. He gripped the small taser that he had built and was working on getting it running through its paces in R&D inside of MI6 for all staffers to carry around. Q had been carrying it since it had passed the stage of trials, especially since he was staying in a hotel now. It had been three days of him there so far, and James still wasn't home from his last mission. There had been a small complication in the surgery he had to fix his broken leg, so he had been kept in America.

The sight when Q opened the front door to the suite that he was staying in was one that Q would cherish for a long time. James was standing on a pair of crutches at the stove in the kitchen area. He was stirring something with his back to the door while there were two cups of steaming something on the counter behind him, one of them had to be the tea that Q was smelling. He watched James until his agent lover noticed that he was being stared at. James turned his head and gave Q a smile. It wasn't a normal smile but was instead a very drugged up smile. He was on the good drugs it seemed. 

"Hello," Q said as he shut the door and slipped his laptop bag and messenger bag onto the chair that he had dragged over for it. 

"Hello. I have soup on. It's going to need to cook for a while yet."

"Let me see the file on your leg." Q walked over to James and waited for him to turn to face him. James settled his crutches against the counter and tugged at Q. 

"It's in the bedroom. You can look at it later. Let me just cuddle you for a while." James wrapped his arms around Q and pulled him close for a hug. It wasn't a usual hello hug. There was no quest to get his lips on Q's as quick as possible. There was just the feel of body pressed to body, and then Q felt the exhale through James' nose as he buried his nose into Q's curls at the nape of his neck. Q wrapped his arms around his lover even tighter and waited for James to start to pull back. 

"So how long on the soup?" Q asked as James finally started to pull back. Q would have stood there as long as James wanted, but his legs were beginning to ache from standing without moving at all. 

"About an hour for the heat I have it on. Why don't we go and sit in the sitting area?" James asked.

"Sure. Sure." Q stepped back so that James could get his crutches under his arms and get steady before he started the slow walk to the sitting area. James's lower leg was in a boot that was keeping it stable. With the wound from the surgery, it was hard to have a cast on it, so Q understood the boot. He would help James keep it all clean, removing the boot to make sure nothing was festering anywhere. Q had taken a few small classes with the Infirmary staff to learn how to properly care for the wounds that James refused to go to them for. James could take care of them himself. That was why he refused to go to medical, but Q liked taking care of him that way. 

James settled on the couch, laying his crutches down on the ground at the side, leaning against the couch as well as the coffee table. Q stepped over them instead of going around the other way. When James had his leg up on the pillow that was on the coffee table, Q gingerly sat on his thighs, feeling James' hands settled on his waist to help him settle. Q put a little more weight on James' uninjured leg until he made sure that the added weight wasn't going to hurt him. James fixed that by using his grip on him to put him all the way down.

"The break was clean, so the doctors don't see a reason that it won't heal up just fine. I go in tomorrow for medical to look at me as well as talk to Mallory. I'm good to do things here at home, so I'll probably work on training and such. I'll probably get bored, but I'll be home to spend time with you, so I'm sure I can endure it." James let go of Q's waist and cupped his face instead. His hands were shaking a little, and Q almost asked what that was around when he felt the tug to get his head to James'. They stayed like that with foreheads pressed together and just breathing the same air. James' hands started to shake less as he was holding Q just like that.

"Tell me."

"You saved my sanity in there Q. I've had issues with coffins since my parents were buried. I dreamed every single night for three months after their funeral that I was in there with them. It was random, whether it was mother or father, but I dreamed it all the same. I would be held by their corpse hands, and they didn't let me go. Even if Kincade heard me and got to me in time, the arms never let go, and I died from exposure before I was released. It's stuck with me longer than childhood fears should. I've never had to face it in training as it's not something that happens all that much to agents who are alive. Being in small spaces does not bother me, but I could smell the dirt, the head body that had been in there before me. I didn't like it."

"No, I can't see how you would." Q tipped his face down a little so he could rub his nose along James'. He felt the muscle change in James' forehead that told him he was smiling even though Q had his eyes closed. He smiled back and just stayed like that, giving James the support for his fear without making James feel like he failed.

"Your voice kept me from freaking out. I knew with you listening that help was on the way, and I just had to keep control of myself as I laid there and waited for someone to rescue me. I don't like that part."

"No agent does. Inactivity is a sure death on that part." 

"Make love to me tonight, Q."

"Sure, James." Q was already working on getting how it was going to go in his head. He knew it was possible. He had no clue if what James was on would allow him to even get hard, but he knew that James needed the action to remind himself that he made it out of the coffin alive. Q would do anything to make sure James knew that.

# The End

**Author's Note:**

> I write fanfiction for fun. It's a hobby and a stress relief. I refuse to stress over my writing. What you see is what you get. Errors, plot holes, and all. Thank you for reading my story! 
> 
> I can be found on MeWe [here](https://mewe.com/i/beccaqueen1), join me there and we can discuss my fics and whatnot.


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